Last year around this time everyone was getting ready for the Desktop Summit. I couldn’t make it and I could still kick myself for it tbh. Watching it remotely was rather painful as the information flow wasn’t as good as it could have been. So I promised myself two things for this year’s Akademy: 1) I’m soooooo going to be there. 2) I’m going to help make it easier on the people who can not go for whatever reason.

So here is the run-up of resources you will need to keep up-to-date on all things Akademy while it is happening in 2 weeks:

Be there! You know you want to I’ll also be doing 3 BoF’s on git, community and wikis for those interested. Oh and I’m writing on a paper on mentoring to accompany my community talk. I’ll post it here when it’s published.

I’m back at home from the multimedia and edu sprint in Switzerland (yea the one some people call cheeseland and others chocolateland) and things are finally getting back to normal so time for a bit of blogging. It was productive, fluffy and awesome! Those three pictures sum it up pretty well
Check out my Flickr page for more pics.

Having a lot of projects at the sprint was really great. For example I’ve worked with j-b of VideoLan fame on some announcements and website restructuring and helped the edu team with promo and community building advice. A lot of progress has been made on the VLC backend for Phonon which will hopefully solve a lot of the small pain points we still have in Amarok. Besides getting the VLC backend in shape the next weeks in Amarok land will be spend on improving startup time for example. New script bindings by Ian and Richard should help quite a bit with that hopefully. Colin did not have an easy job being the PulseAudio guy but he was a really good sport in not-so-friendly territory ;-). We also had a telephone meeting with the QtMultimedia guys in Brisbane which cleared up quite a few things even though the setup of the meeting was a bit adventurous. Sharing knowledge not only inside the KDE teams but also meeting with other free software teams like this is invaluable and should be done more often.

A big thank you to everyone who helped make it possible. You’re fluffy.

I have two very enthusiastic Season of KDE students who need a mentor for writing a new AI for KSirK. However it seems the games team doesn’t have anyone who is free to mentor this.
So if you think you could mentor this please get in touch with me via email. Thanks! You’ll get cookies at Akademy

Stu is awesome and because he’s awesome he wrote a nice wrap-up of the successful SoK 2009 projects for Google’s Open Source blog. Go and read it and see the cool stuff that has been done last year.

This is the package our 4 successful students received:
Thanks a bunch to Giulia, ruphy and sheytan for designing the shirt and certificate and Claudia and Torsten for getting them printed and shipped.

Season of KDE is quite popular again this year. Yay! However we’re a bit short on mentors for ownCloud and digiKam projects at the moment. So in case you think you could mentor a student working on either of those 2 projects for the summer please get in touch with me asap.

PS: Mentors for other projects are also very welcome. Get in touch with me and I’ll make a list.

While Google has been very very very generous this year we still had to reject very good applications again simply because there were no slots left for them. The decisions have been tough but we hope to have done the best we can. Now if you are one of the people we unfortunately couldn’t accept into GSoC for KDE we have an offer for you. Like in previous years we are running Season of KDE for you. You will work on your project with a mentor by your side and a timeline to stick to and you will get a certificate and t-shirt plus possibly some Google swag once you have successfully completed your project. We can’t pay you like Google does unfortunately but you’ll have a great experience and learn a lot. We’re aware that you might not be able to work on it full-time like during GSoC so your mentor will work with you to adjust the scope and timeline of the project.
If you are interested in this opportunity please send an email to kde-soc-mentor@kde.org and we’ll work the rest out together.

We’ve just released a beta version of Amarok 2.3.1, codenamed Dark Star. It comes with sweet things like the Automated Playlist Generator and new context view applets showing similar artists for example. Check it out and help us get it ready for final release by reporting bugs and sending patches.